In the Will

​I listened today to a really interesting post on Instagram on video recorded by someone I really admire who is exploring their relationship to narcissistic abuse in childhood, that abuse continuing through their adult life, the real legacy from their parents. 

They are seeking to heal and become their true self. To find an abundance mindset and joy.  Not remaining in a scarcity mindset as the self that revolves solely around the narcissist. Brave stuff to tackle indeed. A complex journey of examining self, family, roles, patterns and emotions. What follows is my attempting to process my own life and my own legacy. Through narcissistic family abuse as a lens.  

I’ve long known that my father was an overt narcissist, if not a pathological one. I have really been extremely reluctant to talk or write too much about it. Been burned -especially in my extended family. The one system you look to for unconditional love and support with these hard realities isn’t accepting of this kind of sharing. Not an ounce of sympathy to be had. I suppose that might tip me off to understanding it is a “narcissistic universe” I’m living in. Never a welcomed topic. 

I knew not wanting to appear to be fixated on daddy issues, or seen as a complainer, or a dreaded “whiner” -largely from the programming Dad implanted in me -that openness would lead you to fully believe you can literally never speak of what you’ve experienced.  (Or you’ll get shut down) Plus I have been forced to face I’ve been married to someone who has apparently got some major avoidant and covert narcissistic traits. With him I always felt that if I spoke about my own childhood or what I had experienced, I was either boring him or immediately going to be told just basically to be silent about it. But this posting that this friend is doing now, someone that I knew through much earlier brave education blogging, is so revelatory to me, and so meaningful. I hope she continues to explore the topic, and then I’m lucky enough to find those explorations to look at my own life.  She’s about to start coaching and that will be very important work. 

Today this got me thinking about how through my life my father was constantly talking about his death -easily from age of 40 on. I can remember on a “vacation” to Williamsburg -me at ten- no vacation it was to actually pick up my maternal grandmom and bring her to our house in WV, when his behavior was just so emotionally outrageous. Plus car mechanical issues were so bad, I remember him clutching his chest saying he could go anytime. Dead. He would claim for years he had a heart attack then- especially if called on his cruel maniacal driving and hysteria. As a “you did this to me.” He delightedly found in his 80’s some doc to say maybe he had a mild one. Which confirmed for him both he was close to death and rightly he had proven we were responsible. But the threat of his death was now operational all the time after that. Of course being human he really ended up going at 92. Quite a stretch from 42. 

After 24 years married he divorced my mom and pretty much from then on was completely unattached to being a real father, but he was directly threatening us quite commonly with our being on welfare, or my mom not working and going on welfare, or his death. Which was stated to be our immediate having no way to survive. Threatening what a disaster it would be. What if he wasn’t around was especially threatened on a holiday or your birthday, or just basically saying that he was gonna die if you needed him or had a good moment. In me it built enormous fear. Panic. Anxiety and worry, hyper vigilance. Inertia.  He also clearly had a fear of death and he really died in his 90s eventually, after quite a lot of drama, and difficulty in our lives. But at some point in my teens, he began referencing his WILL. Of course he implied that he had a lot of money (untrue) or he had a great deal to leave to people which wasn’t true-just exaggerations of his. I knew that. Many didn’t.  But he kept talking about this will, and getting your Social Security number or calling you up out of the blue and saying he needed your children’s Social Security numbers,  and he continued this will referencing for years. If he was angry with you he was writing you out of the will, or telling you who he was instructing you were not being “allowed” at his funeral. Until he cancelled one altogether. If he was manipulating someone else in the family, which is primarily my brother or my mom or his brothers or cousins, he was writing them in or out. Mom went out for good after two years being divorced.   Are you in or out- or you were to give another family member a message on the will, or get their Social Security numbers -in every on going death conversation dropped on you in inopportune times. To escalate fear. And he played the game “who will be executor” for ages, or some aspect of this. His will kind of hung in the air in every weekly phone contact with me for 35 years. The will was topic one- in a it started a really really long time ago way-when I was probably around 19 it began-and he was at his most destructive about it with my mother and their divorce and doing things that were so cruel. Annihilating. Then for my sanity and ethical survival as a decent being I decided that I would not -no matter what he said or did -would not be moved around by that will stuff more than I could humanly resist. 

I knew there wasn’t going to ever be an “inherit anything” day from Dad. There wasn’t. The route that played out I certainly never foresaw happening as it did-and then eventually in time I realized I’d be so old anyway-65. The fears of my own from nearly dying of medical issues and leaving my kids unprotected were so long past. When something in a will might have mattered. It really wouldn’t be significant security -it wouldn’t give me security, and it didn’t. I always intuitively knew that. 

Definitely I realized that he wasn’t going to look after his grandchildren or consider them as even beings, because he made no effort to be in their life and to know them. Dad refused to visit because he said I hadn’t returned a visit after the one visit he made when they were very young- when he knew I had no money for that. I was dealing with my own covert narcissist marriage issues- anyway a spouse who wasn’t going to put himself out to visit my family under any circumstances.  I had my mom to watch out for living with us eventually she needed care. She needed me at home.

So that WILL he threatened-you know I never actually saw until after he died. My spouse looked it up online, and this is all a very complicated story.  I’m sure his will was written and rewritten so many times that it would be funny to see all the many versions. I wouldn’t even believe it.  But three months before he died in complete dementia, and completely out of it, a person rewrote the will writing out his brother as executor and leaving the entire thing to what I assume is his fourth “wife” (though I really never saw a marriage license or proof that they actually married.) Burning us all -kids and family, in the end, everything he owned went to a person who was a grifter and really shouldn’t have been in the country.  (my name misspelled in my father’s will by the ghostwriter) It was just an example of a person losing so much judgment and aging into narcissism so badly. He was so severely mentally ill he couldn’t even do the damage to people that he intended to do because he himself was being so damaged by somebody that was basically taking him on a ride. Echoes. 

My dad. I have to explain better that story. I will just say that in his later 70s, living in the house he had in WV after his third divorce, a person came down from an apartment complex that was on a hill above where he lived in WV and stole his vegetables out of his garden in his yard, or this is what he told me, the tomatoes, and he stopped them. He said a Chinese student on an expired student visa- this woman-he addressed saying that if they wanted to take things, they just needed to ask. Well within a few weeks, she was moved into his house. She took alright. Never to go away again, suddenly called a housekeeper that he owed for what she did, or then called a health aide. I never before heard him say he ever owed any woman anything for their care of him.  But really Dad could not be alone with himself. She actually was an illegal immigrant from China, and I was later to see that there had been litigation against her. I found it online with the federal government for it looked like what was called a false claims court settlement or action. It appears that she found a  military person —had married to obtain her citizenship -that this had been found out and nullified. My father somehow ended up paying some fines around this for her and getting lawyers to get her citizenship. He went silent to family during this time, and my calls unanswered. He was unreachable, unlike the rest of his life, ( such an echo for me now) and it was impossible to learn through this time what was going on. The grifter ran his life now. 

I was fighting cancer. Raising kids. Working full time. And for about 15 years, it was impossible for me to call my father, reach my father, talk to my father, except in furious raging accusatory phone calls made from him about every five months in which I was accused of not caring about him. And not calling. She made sure that my brother was not allowed access to his father either and my brother lives in the same town. I live far away and basically all of his years of narcissistic manipulation, sort of blew up in the hands of a 30 year younger person who had some diabolical tendencies.  

I’d learn from friends in town he built her a house on the lot next to his house while she rented out every room in both to Chinese students. Ridiculous stuff. He clearly lost control in the way I’m reading an elderly narcissistic person often loses control, my father in the end had his will rewritten or worked over by a person who had sort of taken over his life by claiming they were a “caregiver.” Something they were completely unqualified to do, and who eventually made a couple of weird calls to me, looking to solicit my help in having him “put away in state care” and then it was calling law-enforcement to get him arrested. At 88.  My brother received a bunch of calls in the middle of the night from local police, and I was texted weird clips of recorded things saying he had threatened her with murder. She tried for a while to have him put away as a potential murderer in his 90s, wheelchair bound, with severe back pain. He spent 10 or more years medicated on morphine in his 80’s and other kinds of drugs for his  absolutely terrible back issues. His doctor called me to inform me of his life situation  from West Virginia (I live in California) to tell me of this situation with Dad’s consent. There was no way I could effectively deal with it because my own son was suffering schizophrenia, and my own health very very severe -and I had a spouse with “no means to travel problems”. So in fact, my father‘s life was taken over by a person who really shouldn’t have been in the country at all-who overstayed a student visa, and who used illegal means to secure citizenship. Despite saying that he was in dementia and needed to be locked up in a facility for being potentially her murderer, they then got married which a delighted cousin sprang on me on Instagram, when he was in 89. We’ve never seen the evidence that this marriage actually occurred - he was driven over state lines for some reason to Cumberland, Maryland. It’s always a crazy town story with a narcissist in my experience of the disorder.  I know for a fact that had I been effective in dealing with immigration or with some agencies, I really could’ve stopped some of this. Calls about elder abuse to the state helped him. Though then I was literally launched out of his life and will.  I know that my father had gotten himself into it all, just like I know I hear it echoing in my life now. 

Eventually he met his match. My brother uses the term grifter. That’s what gets drawn in. This then sort of inflicted on all of us situations and family positions beyond our coping. Mainly  I just was preoccupied with my own really severe personal health and immediate family issues. I felt it was possible I’d be arrested on some false charge if I just showed up there. She had tried for attempted murder with dad. Her fiancé. 

That’s narcissism played out.  A horror fantasy. It drove him to fear greatly in later senile years of becoming incapacitated and really not then able to take care of himself. His problem solving was as insane as his mental disorder. He was sort of driven his whole life by being a person that wanted complete control,  and to do things for himself, but really still using others, and to depend upon no one, but needing narcissistic supply-and yet continually involved and  “trapped by marriage” with pretty good  women and inflicting a lot of narcissistic abuse on them. He was  looking for this thing they call  narcissistic supply. Dad wanted others to think well of him-that mattered- to be constantly sort of talking about his opinions, and his agendas, and him. You know that was the role of these women -the holding up of his life, but this will, and this, holding his death over your head, and his threatening you with it was a means to have you remain in his realities. As supply. As compliant. For long years when I was younger he utterly terrified me, no one wants to lose their father. Even a physically abusive dad you want to live, you hope one day they will love you.  I would say that severe fear of his death projected on his kids and my mom continued up until about three years before he died. 

That’s when I had an epiphany about it. I just really couldn’t navigate the impossible labyrinth he had set up anymore. It was too nuts. I realized that this fear of his death I held- which came from his own fears of his death -was overwhelming my life when I had to take care of me- but also dad was afraid of facing God for how he had been as a person.  I realized that this fear of death was sort of shame based, a long running inability to deal emotionally-he was a two year old-and it was keeping me immobilized. I had been susceptible to so much narcissistic abuse. Never given much love and no praise and zero attention as his child. Just given the supply duty. It was simply being used so that anyone he could talk to would see me as a sh!t daughter no matter what I did. I realized that there was no way I had to help him, or be successful in helping Dad, and no way would I ever get a penny from my father in a will, or no way would my children be helped. I just saw it all as enormous damage and waste of human energy. Caught in a trap. I was basically disinherited from the time I was about 10 when I somehow didn’t meet his approval and that’s exactly what happened. 

The immigrant who is quite an operator inherited everything he has including artwork I made, including artifacts from childhood, including things that would have no meaning for her. I’m sure they hit the garbage can immediately and this included two houses he was fleeced of by a grifter who was better at it than he was at being a narcissist -when you get old after 70s and 80s when your mind is kind of going and gone. It’s over then. You just are no longer able to even hold onto all of this. He remained, as his doctor said, deeply paranoid, and he remained incredibly difficult, his temper and screaming, scheming, and his distortion was really all he ever actually day to day lived. That’s all he ever knew. He certainly never knew me. At the end a life blown and pretty much represented in a will. 

Hurting others with a final blow. 

It really also has a lot to do with my present situation. Harder to discuss. I’m living in a forced separation after 40 years of marriage. I’m 67. I had absolutely no idea that my husband was unfaithful, unhappy, or going to announce at Christmas that he could no longer live with me and immediately move out.  I had no money saved, no savings, no plan or no idea of that when I retired- I was being encouraged to retire -that this retiring would make me more isolated and completely put in a position that I’m currently in -which is really destitution. Dependent. 

 I have a state retirement that wouldn’t even pay my mortgage, and I have given an entire lifetime to the professional career of a spouse who is now involved with “someone else.” Thin, better, at his workplace, I was told she’s positive and not dark like me. And  instantly I’m facing health worsening issues that are severe from the trauma this caused, facing end of his health coverage too, and I am not up to the legal situation I now face, nor do I have the funds for a divorce. I don’t have the will to live like that.  I will say that throughout my entire marriage to someone I believe to be a covert narcissist, but I have absolutely no qualifications for diagnosing,  I was faced with the situation where my spouse in terms of life planning would not behave like everyone else. 

You weren’t going to establish a career, get a house, have kids, save for their college, cooperate openly and plan together, think of career moves together. Think of family moves. Think of ways to protect your family to build equity -to create stable records. My husband insisted on running every decision and insisted on doing all of the money. The first move made when I was dating him was putting our money together in a combined account- I didn’t really wanna do that. He never showed me where any papers were kept. He never kept records where I knew passwords and ways to get into billing things. He never saved in accounts for retirement other than what the state teacher system established, and basically he never answered questions with a straight answer if I asked. I was left apologizing and confused. Always the confusion.  I learned to be silent. To be blamed for all of the above. I was always scared that if something happened to him, I would not be able to take care of our three children. To that he would say in argument, I was sitting around, planning his death, making then serious accusations against my character, and basically have me apologizing in a few minutes for daring to think of him dying or “wanting that”. And so once again, a different person than my dad was holding out here in the universe this threat “of the will” cause there wasn’t a will with my husband -that was just going to be all this unknowable unfathomable, unspoken entanglement about it all. How does this get handled -with me knowing it was way beyond my capacity to handle a tragic situation- and of course it was beyond my capacity to handle. And now this. It can’t work out ok. I get to just go down. Sacrificed for his desires. Then there is the person who is now in control. That is an issue I absolutely recognize. 

I was kept as uninformed as humanly possible in marriage even when he moved out of here. I didn’t even have a key to the mailbox. For eight years.  He wouldn’t provide a key to the mailbox. He continued to say I had one, or then he didn’t have one, he would say he’d pick up the mail and then didn’t -bills and everything else sat for months in the mailbox. I’ve been forced to enlist the kids. . A furious postal person sometimes would dump it on my doorstep and blast me. No words ever spoken by spouse on any practical aspect or any aspect of him leaving to give me ANY reassurance. I’m punished.  Mail one example only. I finally figured out with some help from my kids to go to the post office and have the mail key changed pay 85 bucks, and then I felt obligated to give him a copy of the mail key with him keeping me in complete “no contact”. I literally had my son take him a copy of this key and he hasn’t presented himself to collect the mail. All this was just a way to keep me from any information on my own life and increase panic and anxiety. To cause debt collection. I didn’t have any passwords on accounts or billing info on-line whatever -with him complaining he had to do all of this -when in actuality you know I earned, I worked full-time, but got very sick with cancer and needing back surgery. Then kidney stones and sepsis ongoing. I Earned. I provided the money for things. Never a house mom. I was open to knowing what bills needed to be paid -where this was kept-over kept in piles, not kept at all. I don’t even have any idea where information on the house is. I just have a mess of paperwork of which sometimes I think all those boxes of just piles of mail things probably should just get thrown out. I don’t know -you see I thought he was working in our best interest on some level -now I know because of the concealing of an affair over I think years-that could not be having my best interest at heart. He’s never been who my mind conjured. My trust and heart are shattered as is my safety -in betrayal. It’s as hard to face as anything I’ve ever known.  He doesn’t even know what my interest is. My interest in his mind is being kept completely pushed aside, not knowing -there was no making out a will because there was no love, or figuring out how to look after the kids, long before he left me. There was resentment and using. Period. I am now invisible. Except for keeping my mouth shut. Before leaving he was working out a way to cash out the equity out of the house without telling me of this affair or anything else -he kept saying to me that one day our house would be the what we would leave to the children, knowing that he’s over here planning another life. And his exit. Not one word has he spoken in nine months about our children. No system of communicating about them. My son needs that support that never was.  How is that ok? There’s so much I can’t face that’s happened, much less planning how to become effective at 67 to manage it.  Where am I supposed to go?  

So what I realize is that in narcissistic abuse -which I have been in since childhood- I definitely know I grew up in this fear of the future or fear of what if something happens or what if we die, which is sort of bound by the idea of you having children and you’re needing to make sure that they’re safe. It’s a mechanism for running the disorder. Thank God my kids are all in their 30s now and building their own lives. There will be no focus on them with my heart and mind torn apart by divorce or the new family of my spouse or his order of the day. They are on their own. But one child does need me because of his mental health.  Daily. This threat of how you can make it when you’re destabilized to this degree is collapsing my psyche. It’s all around things a person who has this disorder -narcissism-this mental disorder create, you are destabilized by their actions and what they say, and the environment of the narcissist is designed to make you insecure, panicking, having anxiety, and so all of that I have seen manifested, and then I’ve held, it’s been too great of a problem for me to solve. And this is the legacy. This is consistent in the wills of families bound by narcissism. 

When I listened to this piece on her mother ‘s will that I began writing referencing,  I heard it through my situation. It hit me that this is just sort of the groundwork for the narcissistic abuse to flourish in, or a sort of a backdrop that this abuse occurs in, that’s just always there and that I don’t even really need to discuss so much the specifics of how it was put in place in either case of my father‘s or now. But you know that narcissistic abuse has held my whole life -in this inner panic of what do I do if this impossible death thing occurs (or divorce from out of the blue) that a person actually had “Weaponized their death” and used it against me. My dad surely did. Furious he might die. Used my empathy against me. And because I cared so much -you know I care so much for my husband his father had dropped dead at 51 and I had been witnessed to this and horrified by this, deeply traumatized by this and here we are I’m 67. And it’s all too much,  but I have to face it all. 

We’re getting older, my spouse may in fact be moved around by his own fears of death. Dad was.  And just acting out. God knows my father was. I think it was the backdrop really for what dad did- a lot of really horrible things to four women that he married. But I know the trauma of my spouse losing his father- what that caused him and his father‘s estate -how his oldest brother had to plow through figuring all of that out. I know that I was for years concerned for the best outcome for my kids. I had serious health issues and massive bleeds and near death experiences from a form of intestinal cancer that infiltrated my main artery in my abdomen in my 40s and because of this, and some other problems too from a serious neurological disorder , then by a burst disc,  I knew that my longevity was not guaranteed. I had been told I had less than five years to live with the GIST cancer and it’s recurring-now- so it’s just an ongoing battle of having it removed and coping with this Gastro struggle. Such pain and toileting issues daily. Alive 15 years though beyond the prognostications. I’ve had deep concerns for how would my kids cope. I prayed to God then and God answered me (almost daily for 20 or more years -for God to allow my kids to grow to adulthood before they would face losing their parent). I think I had just been so traumatized in childhood around that issue that I just knew also from teaching how difficult it was for children who had lost a parent.

 I was overly susceptible to narcissistic abuse in general because of having-been raised in it and I was overly susceptible to abuse around a will or wanting to have security at home. I’m just coming to terms with homelessness and how the things that I do own I cannot value or want to protect, or keep. I have to do what I did at a certain point with my father, which was just accept he’s not gonna provide you any kind of security. He never did. Dad, every responsibility he had as a father he abrogated, and I have to now come to terms with that’s basically what marriage gave me -the illusion of security, and in fact, I have to face the fact that I am not going to have any of those things and it’s going to be stripped from me in ways that are ones that I am incapable of controlling. 

What is peace -resonated so much with me because when you have a wider realization that this is going on for so many others- this is a pattern of human behavior. Narcissist abuse looks relatively similar. It’s knowable.  There are other people walking around in your shoes or in shoes like you have. It’s quite a turn of your head. You just suddenly take it on in a different way- not so isolated. Can’t speak to this articulately yet. People know it in different forms, but basically the same conditions -narcissists mess with your security, they mess with your feeling of independence, they deprive you of information, they distort things, they keep you unstable and depending upon them, and they make sure that you feel ultimately that your survival depends upon them in someway. And they don’t want you. They create dependency, and then they deny you that. They basically get rid of you for being dependent, and when you sort of have this stunning realization that your entire life has been caught within this web of this- “If you’re not here anymore I can’t survive issue”  they have made sure you held in one way or another that truth as reality. I experienced two different ends of the spectrum of narcissism. I’m realizing at 67 that the very ground I stand on -every perception every belief every value everything -has been a reality distortion. I’ve had a history of abuse and if I spend my remaining time, in that recovery, I’ll still just be someone who is recovering from that.  I won’t have built a myself - or who I would’ve been or was meant to be and so it’s quite a thing to turn to look at. 

I really appreciate my friend, addressing how her own mother was trying to destabilize her 19 year-old child by telling him on a birthday -giving him some significant check- that he, if his mother passed away, you know, would he be capable of carrying out a certain will role that I guess his mom was expected to carry out. Morbid. Controlling. Well this kind of morbid horrifying timing, weird manipulating, I just so recognize that. It’s been a piece of my entire adulthood in one form or  another. It’s just the mechanism of narcissistic abuse, this true sad horror legacy. The actual will. You are left with that. It just is what it is, and we all know you’re never supposed to speak of it or acknowledge it openly or become fully aware and awake, but I’m awakening.